Angel Touching

Kind of a tough day yesterday filled with some fairly contentious meetings topped off by an early evening visit to the dentist office for my Favorite Panamanian. The work she had done was fairly involved/painful and I never like situations where someone I love is in pain and I can’t do anything about it. Luckily while anxiously sitting in the waiting room a little angel arrived to assuage my feelings of powerlessness.

A Non-Moving Version of the Photo

My Cali-Daughter sent a picture of the angel, that (of course) being my granddaughter. Using some technology I still don’t understand, when I touched the screen of my I-Phone the photo turned into a quick video. It was just the medicine both my wife and I needed at that point. As we were leaving (after showing anyone we could tackle this latest picture) the dentist was issuing my wife’s recovery requirements and told me that it was important that I keep her from talking a lot for the next 24 hours. I’m not sure he realized what a Herculean task he’d just assigned me and I don’t think my wife appreciated the humor I tried to inject by saying that would be the toughest part of the recovery.

And She is now a Fiver

One of the frustrating meetings yesterday was a confab with the architects and contractors building our new facility. We’re supposed to move in there over the upcoming summer and they finally got around to asking questions that should have been asked six to eight months ago. I think we made a lot of headway though as they will incorporate us in the planning from this point onwards.

Current State of Construction

My Office will be on Second Floor

The whole process brought home a lesson I’ve learned repeatedly throughout my professional life. I’ve run into mediocre managers who through some misbegotten notion of their own importance think the restriction of the free flow of information is conducive to greater productivity. The opposite is true. The micro-managers who live by the mantra “information is power” always fail to achieve the synergy needed to make complex operations succeed. The minor demagogue who instilled that in this project has departed the realm but we’re all still playing catchup for the problems his approach created.

Front Entrance

As painful as yesterday’s meeting was I felt a little closer to my son. I’m kind of weird that way. I really miss the weekly luncheons we had a few years ago when he worked closer to Worcester. During those meetings he would rail about many of the issues that were raised in yesterday’s meeting since he was working as a construction project engineer at the time. Architects, punch lists, shop drawings, and several other more technical terms were bandied about that brought back those memories. Boy, do I miss those lunches.

Need Some Rest from all that Posing!